


Fools and Gods

by May



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Dream Bubbles, F/M, Mind Control, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-19 18:23:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7372618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aranea tries to find her way out of a prison, and she meets somebody else there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fools and Gods

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CullJoy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CullJoy/gifts).



For both a long time and no time at all, you've been stuck. You knew that you were dead after your second real death, and your head clicked back onto your neck and and the after image of an angry snarl faded from your mind. In this immediacy, the darkness was sudden.

It took you a moment, though, to notice that you weren't just floating in the void. There was, just vaguely, the diaphonous sheen of the inside of a bubble. An empty one, hollowed of its innards. In the distance, the void cracks span out like a web waiting to catch something. Even though you've walked and walked, it doesn't come closer, and you've yet to step into a memory. An empty bubble just swirls shadows in its base, and you feel it twist around your ankles as you move.

You haven't seen a soul, not a single one. With a dragging shame, you realise that Paradox Space might have made you a prison. You don't even know what happened after you died, even though you were doing so well for so long. Perhaps Paradox Space simply makes villains of those who challenge it.

The void collects seconds and hollows them out and widens them. Time was never your forte, but you learn to overcome and learn. You adapt, that's the important thing. After all, it's your job to illuminate and shroud in turn, solving problems as you go.

You felt around gingerly when Damara assisted you in moving large objects. Her mind twisted in on itself, bloodied and ragged. But you persevered and you learned and you kept your own mind smooth and unbreakable, like a precious stone.

So, even if there was an impetus to stop, you wouldn't. If you ignore that there's nowhere else to go. The darkness that the bubbles collect feels heavy, as if you were walking through a real dream. You were a pirate queen and you were almost a god, and all you need to do is push until things give way.

The furthest ring is huge when you feel small, and tight and oppressive when you feel like you need more space. Perhaps others would have simply stopped and sat down and let the darkness swallow them. Let themselves fade into the film of the bubble. Maybe this is where the monsters come from. You find yourself turning away from those, almost on instinct.

You strain your eyes to test whether the center trap of the splintered web is any closer. You think you might just be able to see shapes begin to form around you, though they look like reflections on the inside of the bubble. Perhaps the void is obliging you, and receding. Tentative, you entertain that swelling comfort in your gut that happens whenever you get the satisfaction of feeling a barrier break. And that makes light thread under your skin.

Under your feet is turning cool and smooth, like stone. You can't see anything when you look down, but you're certain that you're standing on something, now. You concentrate, and your mind takes you back to walking to schoolfeeding, and this lets something hardgrown fall away for just a moment. But thit is not enough to restore memories. Though, you think you see some of the shadow shapes growing edges, perhaps forming a little depth.

There's a figure, shimmering against the shadows. It's slender, and taller than you. You catch the outline of roundtipped horns that point straight up, and braids that fall past narrow hips. Your bloodpusher throbs, and there's a horribly vulnerable, naked pang of sadness. You've missed her, and you're assuming that she's missed you.

You walk towards her, and she waits for you, and you wait to see the grey of her skin, flush with just a hint of her fine blood, and the bright sharp of her eyes. You're sure that she'll lead you back.

You see her teeth first, and they're too large in her face. Larger than you've ever seen them, before. And, then, she's so much taller than you, and your head no longer fits on your neck, your body like boneless jelly beneath it. Then you run, and the path disappears from under your feet. With a tentacle, a creature laps at the bubble underneath you, and you are caught for a moment, or maybe for much longer than that.

You stop to reconvene after that, your own firm, respectable blood just beneath your skin, adding blue to your cheeks. Nobody saw except Paradox Space, itself, and that has you hidden away like a mutant grub. It has clearly rooted through your mind with a casual whim.

It gives you another movement on the periphery of your vision. You startle, but nothing more appears, and you sit and glow blue for a while. You think about Mindfang, and let moments of her life play over in your head like a film. You see her triumph, you see her fail, you watch her in those intimate moments, when she stole incidents of happiness, just for herself. There was a version of you, you remember, who lived how she deserved to.

You can't really be blamed for flinching when you do see another figure, another one outlined in grey. But you aren't going to let this one scare you. You recognise his long, twisting horns, and you're filled with disgust. Part of that is, simply, a natural response; something innate in you to something innate in him.

You sneer, because you're hardly going to run away from him.

"This won't work," you say. Your voice sounds close by, like you might be in a close room. "This is an irritation to me, not a fear, and all it's going to do is make sure that I make actual use of him, again."

You sigh but, really, you do kind of want the satisfaction of seeing something in this place break apart on the inside, especially if you can do it. You'll see it break, see it flake apart.

So you narrow your eyes, and you reach forward with your own pan. You've long had the feel for different kinds of mind, and Gamzee's was sticky and raw, like acid running into fresh wounds. Obscene levels of corruption, when just a little would have sufficed.

You except something to crumble, like dry earth. It's not much, but Mindfang stands behind you, again, and you feel like, at least this, could help you take a strike back at the void. The figure is poised and crouched and still, long limbs folded up and still. It looks deceptively gentle, even though you know it's just the surface. There's a reason why you chose the clown.

You prepare for that earthy breakage, to feel just a small pang of accomplishment when the void retreats just a little. You are light, after all, and it's your job to split through those shadows. You take a breath, and push it back through your spirit, and it filters through.

You are met with something smooth-sided and deep, like a stone with a dark center. You smack against it, and nothing breaks for you. You want to growl, again. You are, once again, trapped in a place you didn't ask for.

You cringe, screwing your eyes up tight and, when you open them, the figure has turned its head towards you, silently staring. One imperceptible movement makes all the difference. It's a subtlety and, sometimes, you know, a light touch is good.

"Like I said," you say, in your best, smoothest, most officious voice. "This won't work."

But there's a quiver on the edges of your voice and you hate it, you hate not being in full control. You want to pull it all back around, and know the points you need to make in order to win.

To make it worse, everything around you, up to the fragile constrains of the bubble, shivers and glitches. You stand still, and it does it, again. After it's done it a couple of times, you realise that has the rhythm of laughter.

"And the unchosen were left behind." It's a voice, but it echoes inside your own pan. You cringe, and you show your teeth. "That's you and me, motherfucker."

"Kurloz?" you say, with a voice that rides on a lilting hiss. At least, you can take pleasure in how it reverberates the bubble, and brings it back from his laughter. But you can feel him smiling in your head. It's all smug, and it stretches, and pushes against your membranes.

"The one and motherfucking only," he says. "Left here like so many remnants of a lost faith."

You step forward. "You can talk?" you ask. "How?"

"Because I gave up my lowly face-twitcher so that I could communicate with the messiah's own voices." You can see his face more clearly, now. Greys of the bubble have deigned to look like stone around him. Kurloz's face looks smoothly carved, somehow deeper than the paint that he wears.

"Weird," you say. But the sight of it crawls across your back, because Kurloz always did. When they had been small, and alive, and he had been quick and talkative, youmerely found him irritating. Then, he'd gone still, and silent, and your animosity for him had deepened. And now, he scratches on the insides of your pan with this strange voice.

The bubble shivers, again, and there's a hitch in it, and the stone-shadows stay in place, as if there's a more meticulous level of control. Maybe, you have wandered into his memory, and you stand on the periphery of the memories, now. If you can get through his odd, prayer-toned memories, then you can get through to where everyone interlocks and where you can see everything.

Kurloz tilts his head, and you think you can see his eyes flash purple, for just a moment. He gives a quick motion, to indicate that you should come closer. You think twice before you move, but this is where the bubble gives you a twisting path, leading up to where he sits, on the ground of the bubble. This is where that happens, where the bubble gives you a clear direction. You sigh, then you smirk a little when your surroundings distort.

You walk up the path, and it's cool beneath the soles of your feet, and you think that, somehow, the bubble smells like old earth and rain. That could be your memories, or it could be his. If it's yours, then you suddenly feel a kind of longing. Something that cries at the base of your pan. You want to grab hold of it, and then follow it. Feel the color of your own memories seep back in again.

Kurloz is at the end of the path, which has chosen to morph itself towards him. He is completely still, his long limbs folded neatly, his narrow back straight, and his face even. You may as well join him.

You do so, and fold your knees against the stone path, and it does indeed feel like cool stone. Your skirt stretches around your knees, because they've left you in the dress you died in. Blue lines on black, meant to taunt you, but you keep Mindfang in the back of your head.

"What do you mean?" you say. Kurloz flashes his eyes at you, and you still sense the expanse of his opaque mind. "What's happening?"

"Don't you know? Don't you motherfucking know?" Kurloz laughs again, and you feel a swell of shame. You want to reach forward and grab his face and hold it in your hand like a piece of carved bone.

"Tell me," you say. "I need to know."

"It's finished. The kingdom has opened and the worthy have entered." There's a sour turn to his voice, a beat in the echo. "Gone to live out their lauded existences in a new world formed just for it."

Kurloz's face hardly betrays a hint of raw feeling, but horror drops inside you like a heavy stone. "I see. How?"

Words aren't coming to you, easily. They bubble up behind your mouth but you can't, for once in your life, decide which words you want to put forth, first. "How?" You repeat it, because that's the best thing to say. You accumilate knowledge.

"They broke off the timeline like it was just bread," Kurloz's voice lowers itself to a menacing rumble, and it skims under your knees and makes the bubble shift. "Made ghosts where there were to be no motherfucking ghosts before."

He glowers at you, and you smooth your hands down your skirt. "I expect you know what happened before that."

Kurloz tilts his head up and watches a monster float on by, overhead. It has a large eye, right there on its underside, with a brown sclera and a violently red iris. Something eternal glints in its pupil.

"I heard a little," he says, before looking back at you. "But you leave behind a stink in a pan, I'll tell you that."

There's a quiet growl coming from his chest. It feels like a smooth veneer has cracked open just a little. And you're kind of intrigued. Not to mention, some treacherous part of you responds to the mere sound of it. It has been so long. The feeling hits you hard.

"Ah. Yes," you say. "That was interesting."

And it was. You take in Kurloz, and he's all sharp lines where your other clown was loose, and you could command his body and his mind like a marionette. Kurloz would probably move in sharp steps, like something with neat, hinged joints. If you were inside his head, but you haven't properly looked for cracks in it, yet.

"He was good and useful, for as long as he was quiet," you say. Because it was true, but also because there's suddenly a dangling thread, and you want to pull on it. You're certain that this is because you want to find your own memories.

Rage is constrained beneath Kurloz's face, like a statue serving to make a point. You remember the point when the timeline got away from you, and you couldn't regain control of it. You chased it, but it was gone until your neck snapped.

Your own rage sparks shallowly, but his is like a boiling pool, deep enough that something lurks beneath the water. Something unseen, but monstrous. Gamzee's mind was in bloody rents, and there were innate things embedded into his membranes. That is the difference between you and them.

"To take an emmisary for your own motherfucking means, is blasphemy," he says. "The worst kind of mess to make of the messiah's most righteous path."

"Really?" you say. "The worst?"

Kurloz's eyes flash, meanly, and you can see the horror that sits inside him. He keeps it contined, his facepaint making a veneer to it.

You continue. "In case you never noticed, I know a lot. Everyone relied on me as a source of help and information."

"You were never important," says Kurloz, his mental voice, somehow, carrying the strain of contempt. "Nobody was motherfucking important. But you, you got it into your head that you were better."

His face is like a smiling mask, and everything leads to this point. And you hit him, palm flat against his cheek. It makes impact with a fulfilling kind of smart across your hand, and Kurloz jolts under the hit.

You've never hit anybody before, but the entire motion is one of satisfaction. A neat physical dot of punctuation. Everything settles, everything is still, but it's as if you've brought life in with the tension.

Everything snaps when Kurloz lunges for you, and you've never seen him move like that towards another troll, either. It's as if he uncoils, all of his limbs moving as one to angle him forward. His fingers are around your arms and you feel his fingertips digging in hard enough to bruise. His face is close to yours and, suddenly, it's as if something long past has risen up to take its place behind his eyes. 

"I think it's rich of you to be accusing me of that when everything you've ever said is about the brilliance of your religion. Or whatever," you say. There is a boiling tension in your gut and the press of fingers against your arms is the most intense contact you've had in such a long time. But your voice is cool, for now.

"I never tried to say I was a motherfucking messiah." His voice is less than a voice, here, and more like a hiss. "You did. And so the timeline lived without you. You were irrelevent, the end."

You shrug yourself out of his grip. You could walk on, but you don't want to be on your own, again. He's the first person you've seen in eons, or possibly just weeks, and the anger and tension that curdles inside you is fresh.

"But you didn't want your ancestor to be useless, did you?" And you decide to pull that thread. "And I'm certain that he is, in this new timeline."

Then, you find yourself prone against the ground, your face against the path, your eyes staring down into the infinite of the void. Nothing drifts past, but you close your eyes, anyway. The path is smooth against your cheek, just tactile enough to be be something. Kurloz isn't putting his weight on you, but his presence is just solid enough for it to mean something.

You're planning on telling him that the tension pooling through you is practically its own entity. You're relinquishing, at this point. "I made him so useful," you mutter. Because you did, you really did.

The bubble shivers again, in a mocking laughter, and Kurloz has his fingers tangled in your hair, and it pulls just a little at your scalp, but that's enough for you. You struggle back enough to let your face lift off of the ground.

You hear whispering, then. Scratching on the inside of your skull, but differently so from how he has sounded up until now. It's too quiet for you to dicipher what's being said, but not quiet enough that you can ignore it.

"What's that?" you say. "What are you doing?"

The shiver-laughter, again, and then he speaks, properly, over the sound of the muttering inside your head. "Prayers too sacred for you to know on, spiderbitch."

Kurloz's pan still sits behind his words, smooth and dark. You reach out for it and begin to crawl over it, looking for an entrance. Kurloz has barriers. So do you. You just need to find a vulnerability, which is hard, because using psionics means you learn to defend your best weapon. If you're good, which you are and Kurloz is and Gamzee obviously wasn't.

You find it, there in the corner, where there's a space that's thinner. Maybe a lesser psychic wouldn't find it, but you do. It's like breaking ice and finding the tender waters underneath. Kurloz shivers, the lines of his body constricting behind you. It's not a physical violation, but the sensation is there, of you inside his head. But it serves him right.

You work your way through his body, into his limbs, and it's like making your way through something lined in steel. Whereas his ancestor was like slipping into something oddly soft, with buttons easy to press. But the need is the same. This is why you have this ability. You know enough to know that this doesn't occur for no reason.

You sit up, and look at Kurloz, and he's waiting for you. His face is softer than you've ever seen it, sweet, almost. His pan is neat and calm, though something lurks in those deep waters, as you know. But there's something else, though. A tint of distress, of fear. It's a bleach on that water, and you think of Mindfang, and how she won her conquests. And there are some who really should be feeling that fear.

You boil on the inside, and it's been so long, so very long. And you know who you are, and you'd never do this to somebody who isn't dangerous. You help people.

You lean forward, and press your mouth against his stitches. It would disgust you, except for the fear that floats in his mind, like blood in the water. The way people react to you being in their minds always intrigues you, and how are you going to learn if you don't learn this. It's how to get people to be their very best.

You find it hard to believe that he doesn't find you the least bit attractive. You get a thrilling stab between your legs. Kurloz is still, so still and contained as you run your hand down his body. He's narrow and firm, with bones close to the surface beneath his suit.

You work your hand further down, over his concave stomach and his sharp hipbones, and there are corners of his mind protesting, and you hold them back. When your hand reaches to cup between his legs, he makes a mental jolt, and you work to suppress it, easily, like holding a lid on a jar trapping something wild. This is so good for you to know.

You feel a softness, and a wriggle, so he's clearly responding, and if there's something more potent than fear, it must be humiliation. Your own arousal is warm and somehow distant, perhaps because you don't find him attractive, because you couldn't imagine. But this is fascinating, and important. There must be victims who have never hurt a soul.

You concentrate between his legs because, if there happened to be anybody watching, that would be the only thing that gives him away. A treacherous movement underneath his suit, and you scout out his pan, again. Want you want to do, is merge his own resolve with yours. If you can make someone wonder if they're operating under their own will, that's an achievement.

So you focus on making him want you, embellishing any attraction that you find. And it's already hard enough for you to know, because you're just that good. There's a soothing pulse between your legs and you pull down the waist of his pants. You think Kurloz makes just the slightest inhalaton as you show his skin to the void.

Even in the shadowed darkness, his bulge is an obnoxious purple, and you sneer and laugh. And your laugh has always been light, and polite, but you think you have an echo in it, now. And you smile, indulgently, and press your hand forward to let it curl around your fingers.

It's silky and wet as it explores your hand, leaving traces of purple, and you're too entranced by the whole situation to find it as disgusting as you otherwise might. It's as if the situation holds an appeal all its own, without being couched in being attracted to another person.

There's a pulse, deep inside Kurloz - in his mind or his body, you're not sure you can tell, but it doesn't matter, he's contained. The pulse reverberates through his bulge, and you thumb the tapering end of it, and it milks, just a little more.

Your own bulge has surfaced, and you feel achingly hollow. You slip your other hand between his legs, and he parts his thighs like a moving doll. This gives you access to his nook, tight and wet and private beneath his sheath. You enter the tips of your fingers and it pulls on them, with a need to have something inside him.

Kurloz's mind is tumbling with fear, humiliation and confusing, but lower down, he needs, and the rest of his body sits around the rest of this like a case. Fluid is beginning to seep between your own legs, so you stand. You're standing over him, now, and you can't resist having him turn his face up to look at you. Slender neck exposed and horns tilted backwards, his eyes are just milky, now. You've held back a dangerous spark.

You lean so that your skirt stays lowered, and he sees nothing as you pull down your underwear. That's a detail that you, perhaps, enjoy. The power of exposure, of being covered. Kurloz's bulge writhes obscenely with need, out in the open.

You pull free your underwear, and they're soaked through with your own respectable blue. You don't let him see a thing else, but he's staring up at you, anyway. Deep in his pan, you feel something dark and bloody and violent, and it reminds you of what you knew about Gamzee.

You lower yourself into his lap, where his bulge squirms, and you almost want to treat it like a separate entity. It finds and twists with your own bulge, like the most natural thing in the world, and that spot of violence pops like a bubble, and spreads. You keep it contained, though, as his bulge laps at your nook, sending a shiver through you.

You let him in, and his pan goes dark, where he's been neatly contained. His bulge fills you, thick and soft and wiry. You move on top of him, and you pull on him, and consume him. He's trapped, now, and this is how he knows he's yours.

He releases his genetic fluid inside you, and you take it in. You know it's not actually real, but it's more of him that belongs to you. You relax, and you manage to hold him still while the two of you recover.

There's a moment, then. Where the bubble breathes, and you stand up, and you neatly arrange your clothing.

There's color to the space, now, just shading like the shades that reflected light makes. But, the path moves onwards, now, and the color deepens. And, at the end, it becomes light.

You stare at it, and you make a choice, because you know what you can do. 

You turn to Kurloz. "Are you coming?" you say, because you still want him to think that he has that choice, even as his fluid sits inside you. He follows you, towards the light, and towards a new world.


End file.
